In the field of this invention it is known that the display of characters on an output medium of a device involves the use of a font, stored in a font file of some format, and comprising many glyphs each representing a character portion. If a required character glyph is not available to the device, an appropriate font file is typically obtained (e.g., via a network download). Such font files can be large, especially where a character set includes a large number of characters (such as a Chinese character font comprising in excess of 20,000 characters).
However, this approach has the disadvantage(s) that downloading such font files over a network can therefore be time consuming, and local storage on a client device may not accommodate the entire font file.
Although it is known to download to a device only those subset(s) of glyphs or metadata that the device requests, this only partly alleviates the problem, and it still requires further download(s) whenever a glyph is required that the device has not yet been requested.
A need therefore exists for a method and arrangement for font building wherein the abovementioned disadvantage(s) may be alleviated.